Where the Atlantic meets the land

by H. Caldwell Lipsett

The next day Cassy was missing, and never returned. For a time there were some queer rumors about her, which at last were confirmed by the birth of her child. And soon afterwards, to his great dismay, he was served with an order for maintenance as the father.

Of course he went to law about it; but, as he afterwards told himself bitterly, he was fool enough to admit that he had kissed her once, and in the light of that admission the jury found against him with £100 damages.

Not long afterwards Cassy was married, and it began to be whispered about that her husband was the real father of the child, and the pair had taken advantage of Vaughan's simplicity to saddle him with the responsibility.

Mingled with their disapprobation before there had been a certain respect in people's attitude to him; they were surprised, and said, 'They didn't think Charlie Vaughan had it in him.' But now all this was changed to amusement and contempt.

But that did not affect 'old Vaughan,' as he now began to be called. He was too much taken up with his own disillusionment to mind other people's conduct. From Cassy's manner he had thought that he had at last attained the wish of his life, but he now recognized the meaning of her regard for what it really was, the mere ephemeral desire of a pregnant woman; and he had let her see through his weakness, and himself suggested to her the means of his own undoing.

His old sense of weariness and discouragement returned upon him and settled down over his life. He saw that with the ridicule in which he was held what had now become his consuming desire, the only means of renewing his self-respect, had become utterly hopeless. His thirst for the wine of life had come to him too late to be ever quenched. He lost heart. The sap went out of him. The neighbors noticed that he failed visibly, and grew rapidly gray. Within the year he was dead, and no woman had ever loved him.

A DIVIDED FAITH

Maggie Paterson stood on the edge of the frozen surface of Lough Legaltian and looked about her with a dreary sense of loneliness. Round her were several groups of chattering girls; they glanced at her furtively from time to time, and she felt that they were talking of her; she wished to speak to them, but the reputation of her father's sternness, the life apart that she had led, and the barriers of custom, which are so strong in country life, stood between them. Some of them she knew by name, nearly all by sight; but though they were of her own age and station, she had never played with them; she had never gone to school like other children; she had always lived at home with her silent, gloomy father, who thought of nothing but his religion.

Now, as she stood there, a spectator of the life in which she should have shared, and the joyous shouts of her compeers rang in her ears, blended with the metallic whir of the skates upon the ice, a bitter feeling of rebellion welled slowly up in her young heart. All the joys of childhood and of youth, which she had never known, all the repressed instincts of her vigorous young life, called aloud in her for outlet, and a slowly gathering wave of restlessness, of resentment against all the forms of her narrowed life, swept over her.